Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION
Clark himself does not try to answer these questions, they are good ones. To do
no more than sketch some answers: the large size of pictures like Autumn Rhythm
suggests large intended spaces; given the visible effort to be more than wall decoration,
the most likely ones, after the studio, are those of the art world: galleries
and museums. The “work against metaphor” Clark, like others, identifies as
determining the paintings’ formal method indicates as expected viewers the
normal inhabitants of those art-world spaces, no doubt in the first place other
artists, who could be expected to come equipped with the habit of reading
modern artworks metaphorically. In addition, as works of art, and in particular as
paintings on canvas, they anticipated or at any rate hoped for buyers.
In Beaton’s pictures, the Pollocks function neither as mural nor as easel paintings;
visible only in part, they are subordinated as décor to the model and the
dress. Fifty years later, the paintings have long since triumphed culturally and
economically over the fashions and the photographs. The fame of these photos
today is largely due to their connection with Pollock. Even if fashion has now
made it into museums, it lives, when not segregated in institutions of its own, in
the basement or in period rooms, along with the other arts décoratifs. The catalogue
of a 1999 exhibition of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute
devoted to “The Four Seasons” in dress featured a detail of Autumn Rhythm on its
cover. A Pollock retrospective would never have a Beaton up front.
Yet the illustrations for Vogue still irritate art historians and theorists. For all
the conventionality of their daring, these photographs can be as subversive of
received ideas about art as Pollock’s work once was. By bringing highpoints of
both personal expression and formal exploration into collision with mondaine elegance
they raise questions not only within but also about the discourse of art,
and in particular about the intimate relations of art to the social environment
from which, as “everyday life,” that discourse wishes to distance it. For instance,
they expose the interrelation between a conception of art linking masculinity
with creative intensity and an idea of the feminine as the decorative embodiment
of powers of consumption and display. Most generally, they suggest the
idea that the meanings of artworks are not given simply by the physical and
visual nature of the works themselves but—to emphasize a commonplace—by
the uses to which they can be put.
The paintings in which Pollock worked out his ideas about art in New York in
the late 1940s, about his personal life experiences, and about the relation between
the two in the practice of painting, provided others at the time with signifiers of
fashionable excitement, sophistication, and privilege. Today they provide Professor
Clark with exemplars of the idea that political opposition to capitalist society
can be located in cultural activity, if only imbued with the grandeur of inevitable
failure. Beaton’s use of them reminds us that the sense of failure depends on the
claim to political grandeur. After all, the idea that art—whatever the artist’s
wishes—can “resist” the culture that produces it is as dubious as the hope that an
economically underdeveloped country could have been the scene of a communist
revolution in 1917.
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